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I was reading the review of SiS645 motherboards at Tomshardware.com and noticed the following are listed as boot devices on one of the motherboards:
Floppy, LS120, SCSI, CD, HD 0-3, ZIP100, LAN, USB-FDD, USB-ZIP

Has anyone tried booting from a USB Zip or floppy drive? Can you boot from HD 1,2 or 3 without designating them as the Master harddrive on the channel??? (otherwise, what's the point?) Are LS-120 drives reliable? (They've been around for a while, but nobody I know has ever used them since Zip drives became ubiquitous in the business sector first). Are there any "tricks" to making the LS-120, Zip, and USB versions bootable?

I'm intrigued with ditching my conventional floppy and appreciate anyone's comments, suggestions, and/or experiences.

Many modern BIOS have the ability to assign the boot device (80) at will. It works just fine with IDE HDDs and floppy drives. I don't know about USB, however. I'm still waiting for a good bootable USB flash drive.

On 2002-04-04 19:16, Speed wrote:
Many modern BIOS have the ability to assign the boot device (80) at will. It works just fine with IDE HDDs and floppy drives. I don't know about USB, however. I'm still waiting for a good bootable USB flash drive.

Nice thought. One of those thumbdrives to boot a system would be just uber-geeky. Throw in an encryption code on it and there you are.

You can boot from a PC card with this solid state drive I picked up on the cheap for $15. Its an IDE device and unfortunately cannot be swapped while the system is on without crashing the PC. To this device a compact flash card in a PCMCIA adapter in the slot is a hard drive. It can be set to be either master or slave on the ide chain.

Yeah, but how many PCs have PC Card slots? If bootable USB really is workable, I could have my trusty Linuxcare bootable business card utility CD distribution and be able to save files to it. And since almost every computer has USB...